EVE General Discussion

Are you two serious?

How on earth is PLEX a liability by anyone's stretch of accounting definitions? Liabilities are money owed by CCP, when someone buys a PLEX it is NOT considered a form of debt that CCP owes anyone. If there a billion PLEX bought but not used that isn't a liability, if CCP shut down tomorrow players owning PLEX would be no where on the list of debtors that need paying.

You both don't have a clue what you're on about,international accounting standards are that you recognise a sale as soon as it's made, not when you receive the payment. As soon as someone buys a PLEX using real life money, the value of that sale needs to be recorded on the P&L. The income received from this is in the form of cash, which when you produce a balance sheet would be in the form of retained profit (if there is profit). Do you honestly believe PLEX is featured as a liability on CCPs balance sheet?

You should try reading CCP's balance sheet and then their terms and conditions. Everything you own in the game, including PLEX you have purchased, do not belong to you, they belong to CCP. You have not got a promise of services that you can reclaim at any point during the future, you have bought an item which is in a game which belongs to CCP.

If you both believe CCP is recording PLEX as liabilties I suggest you both go back to whatever school taught you your accounting, if you even went to one.

Online assets are being increasingly recognised by courts in a range of jurisdiction as genuine assets and in several cases the conditions of the EULA have been ruled irrelevant by the courts in question.

You can write whatever you want in a contract or EULA. Whether it actually means anything in terms of legal risk and obligation or is just legalese mumbo jumbo will depend entirely on how it is seen by a relevant court.

Clearly in the case of insolvency secured creditors get first rights to compensation. After that it gets messy, detinue is probably not relevant but recovery in equity may be.

a lot of alts would loose their purpose.

Some people, apparently OP included, don't quite seem to grasp how PLEX actually works. I will attempt, then, to explain it without sounding too patronising.

1. I, spending roughly £15 of my actual IRL money, buy a PLEX from CCP. It appears in my in-game redeemable items.
2. I redeem it, thus creating a PLEX item in the game world which can be traded, sold, transported and indeed destroyed just like any other in-game item. It is a unique instance of the PLEX item tracked by EVE's databases.
3. I decide to put it on the market and sell it for the price of 700m ISK, at which point Urist McSpacePilot decides to buy it from me.
4. Urist McSpacePilot redeems the PLEX, adding 30 days of game time to his account. The PLEX item disappears permanently. That specific instance of PLEX In the database will never be issued again.

Essentially, then, what has just happened is that I have paid CCP £15 on behalf of Urist McSpacePilot to give him 30 days of game time via a method approved of via CCP, and Urist McSpacePilot has given me 700m internet spacebucks for that privilege. Once CCP has received my £15 they don't actually care what happens to the in-game item - that isn't their concern, as long as I'm not using it in an attempt to launder illegally-acquired RMT money. They are under no obligation to ensure that I get a fair deal for it - Urist McSpacePilot could have paid me 200 billion or swiped it out of a corp hangar I'd left it in for all they care. They don't even care if it's ever redeemed or not - in fact, if it's destroyed, that's money they've obtained that they then do not have to spend on providing server space for the individuals that bought the PLEX. Equally, neither I nor Urist McSpacePilot actually care about each other whatsoever - I only want someone to pay 700m for my PLEX and don't care who it is, and he only wants a PLEX to give him 30 days of game time and doesn't care who he gets it from.

At no point does CCP ever lose (or, more correctly, fail to gain) money from this - everyone character's game time has been paid for by someone in real life cash. CCP's revenue stream remains intact, and it remains a simple, easy method of exercising control over EVE Online's "secondary market" - i.e. third-party trading of its in-game currency. As long as there is a legal, CCP-regulated, relatively simple method of translating real life currency into ISK, people will generally prefer it to unauthorised RMT.

To be honest for me an ideal situation would be if there was no PLEX and no RMT of anykind.

I remember in early days of Eve when server had 3000 poeple max on primetime, and it was a niche enough game that RMT was not really heard off and ofc there was no plexes. Me perosnally i enjoyed the game considerably more , as each ship was a real loss and it mattered not only how you fought but how smart yuo were in earning isk.And no , for many poeple from richer countries loosing a few plexes of ships value per month isnt any problem, no loss feeling.

Nowadays, with my little time, to keep up with everybody buiyng plexes, i buy them too, but for me the game has lost alot of its magic because of this.

Ofc since RMT can never be controlled with current technology, then current situation and PLEX is the lesser evil i guess.

Thats the majority opinion , but imho there is a gap in logic here: its only true if you assume that without plexes, the people that pay for gametimes with isk would stop playing, If they wouldnt, they would have to pay with real money, increasing CCPs income.

OFC wihtout plexes many rl rich poeple couldnt buy tons of plexes to support themselves in game, so prolly counting it all , CCP would loose more then it would gain.

I guess you can neve rbe wrong if you enjoy it:)

However if you pvp , you got to be at least be in same range of isk to compete. MAening i dont use officer items cause i cant afford them and they arentt really needed, but t2 are pretty much needed for serious pvp. And it means around 200-250 milions per ship/loss which in my case means PLEX.

They always cost more than paying CCP for a sub.

I was looking for that earlier but couldn't find it as I was on my phone.

Not recognising revenues from PLEX up front is ridiculous, I can't believe they are doing it. I'd understand more if it wasn't for the fact that it's a virtual good in a game that, if CCP went bankrupt, would basically never have to pay back. It would be interesting to see how much PLEX is inflating their current liabilities.

The subscription thing I get more, as there's more of an argument that CCP owes a service, despite them saying it's non-refundable they have been forced to give refunds for changes in terms and conditions in the past.

PLEX on the other hand is a virtual item in a game that can be redeemed for in game things, one of which is access to a game, that you have already agreed doesn't belong to you. I don't think that really counts as a liability.

A balance sheet liability is any obligation arising from past events or transactions. You cannot possibly be arguing against PLEX fitting that criteria.

SO .... the contention seems to be you do not believe in game currency or property counts as "real" and hence CCP should not count PLEX in its "real" balance sheet.

You are entitled to that opinion but be aware that more and more courts are ruling otherwise.